far and wide through the world, unchecked. Shall slavery continue to degrade millions of our fellow-creatures through future generations, and to extend its deadly influence over new empires--or shall it now receive its death-blow, the children of Africa be free, and America be delivered from what has so long marred her beauty, destroyed her peace, hindered her usefulness, and provoked the wrath of God? This is the great issue now pending!

IV.

ON WHICH SIDE SHOULD THE SYMPATHY OF ENGLAND BE

ENLISTED?

There can be no hesitation as to the reply to this question. Our glorious history, the struggles of our forefathers, the memory of freedom's heroes whose names are household words, our equal laws, the emancipation. of our own slaves, our open and inviolable asylum for fugitives from tyranny of every hue and from every land, our frequent remonstrances with our American brethren on this subject, our reiterated and unqualified condemnation of this great sin, our churches, our bibles, our prayers, all demand that every heart should beat in sympathy with those who are banded together to accomplish what we have so long urged upon them, the total abolition of slavery throughout the empire.

How then can we explain the apparent lack of this sympathy? Partly by the prevailing ignorance and mis

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conception respecting American affairs caused by the gross unfairness of our leading newspapers. The Times especially, by letters to the editor, and one-sided narratives from correspondents, and clever leading articles, has systematically cast ridicule or condemnation on the North, while it has held up the South to admiration. But the suppression or perversion of truth secures only a temporary purpose. England's heart ever beats true to liberty, and her sympathy will be all the more emphatic from having been thus for a while restrained.

Mere politicians think that it would be better for Europe that the great Republic of America should be divided, and thus many who detest slavery, do not sympathize with the North in their effort to restore the Union. It is generally considered that this effort is hopeless, and that the blood and treasure expended in it are absolutely wasted. Thus the sympathy felt with the North so far as the North is opposed to slavery, is checked in its expression by disapproval of a war so sanguinary, yet so unlikely to lead to any equivalent result. It has been supposed that the North has hitherto been fighting for the Union as it was. But by that Union, slavery was guaranteed in the States where it already existed, and fugitives were sent back to their incensed owners. Not because they are indifferent about slavery, but because they so deeply abhor it; many in this country have no sympathy with the North in a struggle, the issue of which, if they succeed, will in their

opinion, rivet more tightly the fetters of the slave, and render his escape more difficult than ever. They therefore wish the South to become a separate Confederation in order that slavery may cease to have the entire power of the Union to prop it up, and that slaves may the more easily escape by the land of freedom being brought so much nearer to them.

But this tendency to favor the final separation of the southern States will be checked as the true nature of the quarrel is better understood. The South are struggling not about tariffs, not to resist tyranny, not from a noble desire for self-government, but to preserve and extend slavery. We have seen by their own confession, that the maintenance of the Union as it was, would be the destruction of the system. It must spread or die. We have seen how, after years of struggle, the North finally said to the South: "Hitherto shall thou come but no farther," and how, by such restraint of slavery they designed its final extinction. Though when the war first broke out the avowed purpose was to restore the Union as it was, this is no longer the case. We have seen how, since the secession of the South, great advances have been already made towards emancipation. If the South is brought back, it will be no longer as an arrogant dictator, but humbled, crippled, impotent to carry out its evil purposes. After the first of January its slaves will be legally free, and then its restoration will secure a vast territory where the negro race, already

do miciled, will cultivate the soil as free-laborers, their liberty guaranteed by the whole power of the Union. But if the South become a separate nation, they do so. avowedly to perpetuate and indefinitely extend all the horrors of slavery.

The Westminster Quarterly Review of this month says, "Should these conspirators succeed in making good their independence, and possessing themselves of a part of the territories, being those which are in immediate contact with Mexico, nothing is to be expected but the spread of the institution by conquest (unless prevented by some European power) over that vast country and ultimately over all Spanish America, and if circumstances permit, the conquest and annexation of the West Indies; while so vast an extension of the field for the employment of slaves would raise up a demand for more, which would in all probability lead to that reopening of the African slave-trade, the legitimacy and necessity of which have long been publicly asserted by many organs of the South. Such are the issues to humanity which are at stake in the present contest between free and slave-holding America; and such is the cause to which a majority of English writers, and of Englishmen who have the ear of the public, have given the support of their sympathies."

But I repeat, the heart of England beats true to liberty. It is impossible she should sympathize with Slavery. It is impossible therefore, when the question is

clearly understood, that she can sympathize with this Southern conspiracy against humanity. An excellent tract," Federals and Confederates," published by Caudwell, 335 Strand, says: "In a war of law against licence, of freedom against slavery, shame upon Christain Britain if she waver in her choice." The New York Christian Advocate, quoted in that tract, asks-" How can civilized nations, and particularly Great Britain, answer to God and their consciences for withholding their sympathy from us in this struggle?" Count Cavour, in a despatch at the outbreak of the war, wrote to the Italian minister at Washington: "This reserve will not prevent us from manifesting our sympathies for the triumph of the Northern cause, for their cause is the cause not only of constitutional liberty, but of all humanity. Christian Europe cannot wish success to a party which bears on its standard the preservation and extension of slavery." Is Italy just emancipated, thus to pour out her ungrudging sympathy, and England, during so many centuries the chosen asylum of liberty, to appear indifferent?

We lament that the negro, though free in the North, is deprived of the rights of citizenship, and is often treated, even when learned and refined, as socially inferior to the white man, even when ignorant and vulgar. Let us hope for better days-but meanwhile let us not confound the condition of the Northern free men with that of the Southern slave. Are those Northern negroes themselves willing to go South? Do fugitive slaves ever voluntarily